I was going to begin this article by listing all of the awards that the original Half-Life has won, but I have a word count limit on this article so let me just name one: Best Game Ever. Period.

In 1998, Valve delivered Half-Life to the world. Gordon Freeman's fight through Black Mesa and Xen was revolutionary in so many aspects: interactivity, story line, NPCs, modding and multiplayer. Did I mention multiplayer? You can't argue with the fact that there are 10 times more people playing Half-Life and its popular CounterStrike mod at any time than any other game (according to GameSpy, at this moment there are 120,276 people playing Half-Life and the next closest is Call of Duty with 12,159 players). But, after Half-Life's original release, Valve was relatively silent about a sequel until last year just before E3. They announced Half-Life 2 with a Sept 30, 2003 release date and presented their technology in closed booth demos at E3. It was huge. Amazing. Ground-breaking. The tech demo showed the physics of the game with objects that had their own mass and sound, and Gordon was sporting a gravity gun, and the graphics were leagues ahead of the others, and and and....